The Devil Plays Tricks
by Killer Intent
Summary: A short. Some where out there is the Ideal; and the Earth is a reflection of that. The beginning of a bout with Naruto and Sasuke.


"_**R**__age--__Goddess, sing the rage of_ _Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls, great fighter's souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds,"_ – The beginning of The Iliad

**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto.

Out there, somewhere, there is the ideal; and the Earth is the reflection of that.

The harsh crackling of electricity echoed in a giant valley where two proud tribute statues stood, both in defiance of the other. They were no longer the grand scale works of art that they once were; just a pair of ominous ruins that were beat and weathered down by a hateful war between two other young men of a newer generation. One's wrath, and the other's will, lifts up from their pores in a thick, almost vile smoke. The two of them gazed calmly into each other's eyes as they prepared themselves for battle as their predecessors once had.

Behind the first warrior, a disciple of the philosophy in which the weak exist for the whim of the strong, stood a giant, mauled form of the Shodai Hokage: his strong jaw had been sawed back just underneath the nose, barely leaving an upper lip and a throat, and the statue's head itself stood on just a portion of the back of the neck and the shoulders, where the padded armor that was once carved so brilliantly was now spider webbed with the damage done by an unrealistic force of lightning. The lower body was intact so far, but the fingers of the hand, which was close to the hip, were missing and the sword in his grasp was now just attached by the palm of the hand. Uchiha Sasuke stood, wearing a ceremonial robe of the Uchiha clan, on the end of the hilt of the sword; he looked incredibly tense, as could be seen in the muscles of his bare arm where hissing whips of electricity manifested. At the feet, there was a devouring black flame, that seemed to be able to do real damage to the great carving, and a great build of that same unholy fire thrived in between the two leaders where a great pool of water once lay.

Behind the second warrior, a man with a sense of justice so profound, and with an acknowledgement that the strong must protect the weak, not bend them to their will, stood the opposing statue of Uchiha Madara. His upper jaw and the rest of his head with it was entirely removed, leaving only the lower lip and a strange surface that looked like it was drilled into by a sphere. There was a gaping hole through the other side of the chest, and giant smooth 'scrape' from the liver to the hole in the chest, completely dismembered his limb from the elbow down. Uzumaki Naruto stood in the crook of the arm, what was left of it, and pressed a palm back against the 'cloth' shape of the stone as he stared down his opponent from so far away. There was foam coming down from over the edge of the fall, but no water pushed through quite yet. The walls that enclosed what was once a giant pool were collapsed like sand piles on either side of the center of the dry floor, where the carcasses of various fish, turtles and other creatures of the waters were left to burn where they once spawned.

From far away a group of Naruto's peers and Sasuke's former comrades stood in anticipation of the next attack. When this fight began, it started off as a non-chakra bout, with only their taijutsu utilized in a long battle. After a violent torrent of physical bouts, that battle finally ended with Sasuke trapping Naruto in a web of wires that pinned him into the falls in between their colossal counterparts.

Naruto showed no desperation. Instead, he escaped through focus and sheer willpower; he pulled on the strands of the web that bound his hands apart until he was able to lock his hands back together; there he manipulated his chakra to summon several bunshin that stretched the wires just enough so that he could drop down from them, and afterwards the wires were left there in the magnificent web that the avenger spun.

Their fight then moved onto the water where Sasuke blasted Naruto with red hot flames of the Uchiha techniques, and, in retaliation, Naruto summoned up two giant toads and had one transform into a splintery, wooden bucket. Sasuke watched in bewilderment as a giant toad splashed him with water and doused his powerful tiger seal flames.

When Sasuke attempted lightning and leapt forward to slam his fist through Naruto's chest, Naruto called on throngs of his clones that spawned right in front of Sasuke's path, disrupting him with a cloud of his minions that were far too quick, even for the Uchiha's Sharingan eye, and finally forced him to land on the Elder's foot.

Angered, Sasuke called on a duo of image bunshin to use as decoys. Naruto stared down to the three Sasuke images as they climbed up the statue's leg; when they finally surrounded him, their wires suspended them in the air by shuriken that he imbedded into the rocky wall close to them, and the three of them spun around in a motion that 'wrapped' around him the way the tomoe in the Sharingan eye wrapped around its pupil. Naruto watched and waited, and when he saw his opportunity, he struck:

Dirt and rock exploded from the dried up wall as Sasuke closed in on the clone, and from that wall jumped out Naruto with hundreds more clones creeping out like wasps coming out of their mother nest. Sasuke groaned when he saw Naruto. The blond was glowing like a fiery angel that came down to the Earth to cast the souls of the wretched and their kin down into the dirt.

'_Sasuke!' _he yelled in anguish. His body twisted back as he prepared to launch a devastating attack on the dark haired assassin. Sasuke still had no footing, and if he continued to hold onto the wire rather than defend himself, he would be struck in the back and obliterated by that destructive technique: the rasengan. Sasuke lifted his blade up and then swiped it in front of his chest. He brought it close and lifted one arm up and bent his elbow to brace himself and the Kusanagi for an attack that could incapacitate Bijuu.

The ground shuddered, and there was no sound, and far away the others could feel their skin burn and watched as moss and left over weeds and lily stocks dried up and then suddenly lit aflame as a crystalline light shone in the darkness far away, and there was still no sound. Hatake Kakashi, a former ANBU captain and one-time cell leader, now one of the members of Naruto's nameless team, screamed at his comrades with urgency, 'Move, now!'

With a start, Haruno Sakura jumped out of the way and moved almost twice as far as Kakashi had. Her friend and team mate Sai was already waiting for her far out of the attack's dominion. When Sakura finally landed just outside of a garden of dying pools, she noticed several more figures in the dark, and squinted to try and make out who they were.

'Sakura? Sakura!' A voice in the dark rang out, and she saw the silhouette of a shapely woman running towards her.

'Who's there?' Sakura called back, and she moved to take out a kunai from the pouch strapped around her waist.

'Sakura, it's me, Hinata!' She said. She brought her hands up placating manner.

'O! Hinata!' Sakura said. She let out a sigh of relief and let her kunai drop back into her pouch. When Hinata came near, Sakura placed a hand on her shoulder and looked with fearful eyes into Hinata's confused ones.

'Sakura, what on Earth is that?' She said.

Sakura narrowed her eyes and then turned to look back towards the battle, which already raged on once more without the audience.

'You don't know what it is either?' She said, troubled. Naruto had never shown this variation of the rasengan, or what ever technique it was.

'It's Naruto's _sudden typhoon_.' The two girls gasped and spun around at the voice that came from behind them.

'And I suggest that we move. It will be passing through here quite soon.'

Sakura stared at the blonde woman that stood behind them in shock. The features on Hinata's startled face were quite similar; it looked like the two of them had just seen a ghost, one raised from the dead.

'_Ino_!' Sakura could vaguely feel the tears on her rosy cheeks. _She's supposed to be dead, _she thought.

'Come on. Let's go.'

And there was sound. And it was loud, piercing and unforgiving.

'Ah!' Sasuke fell down to the fiery pit below with the shattered pieces of the grass cutter raining down like a majestic rain; glitters of silver and ash smeared across Sasuke's body as he plummeted down to the horrible, pitch black hell below. Then a hand reached out, and with a sudden jerk Sasuke was held suspended just above the flames of Tsukiyomi. He screamed because of the intolerable pain, but the clone that held him in mid-air paid no heed and no pity. A swarm of orange crawlies came upon the corpse, and then each of them took turns lifting Sasuke's nearly lifeless body up higher and higher until he was finally in Naruto's grasp.

The golden blond held him by his wrist and lifted his arm up until they were facing eye to eye.

'Learning is difficult, isn't it?' He said. Sasuke gave no motion to answer, just acknowledgement that he heard the question by groaning in pain and averting his eyes.

'You can not learn without pain. What made you think that abandoning your friends was the right choice? We could have grown strong together, Sasuke, like brothers tutoring one another, and thriving together. Instead, we fight like this every time you decide you want to try and destroy Konoha. What is this? The third, right?' Naruto gazed, stricken with pain at yet another encounter with his, once, closest friend.

'Usura…uratonkachi…' Sasuke gazed down towards the feet of the Madara sculpture, and he found no other words to say, and felt as if an eternity wouldn't give him enough time to conjure up the right ones.

Naruto sighed, and then let go.

And as Sasuke fell, the two of them made eye contact, and, just like that...

Naruto grimaced. Just like that, Sasuke was gone.


End file.
